“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
(Pablo Picasso, according to Steve Jobs…based on no evidence)
One of the best tricks I’ve found for making sure you get stuff done is having a structure. As we talked about in the Last Post having limitations gives you framework to work within, but having structure can be very beneficial to your creative process. One of the best ways I think of learning about structure is by analysing other songs. But don’t just analyse other songs in for example a written form you can also save these analysis as structural templates for later use.
Simple way to do this would be to load up a song into abelton and match the BPM and then add coloured MIDI clips signifying the structure. You could then export this as a structure to be used as part of your user library. Let me show you how. I’m going to start off with a drum and bass template song I created for some of my students. They were supposed to learn the key characteristics of drum and bass as well as be able to follow the structure.
I used ‘DJ Fresh – Gold Dust’ as my example. (177BPM)
In this case the first step is to go through and analyse sectional parts such as introduction verse chorus breakdown etc. Usually I try and mark days in different colours with blank MIDI clips on a new separate track. After that I usually like to add another track for extra notes or secondary analysis – this might be transitional elements or just more general detail. See below
For students this can be a very beneficial process because they are following the structure and can even follow the idea and inspiration behind a song. even if you just want to use the structure this can be very useful way to build a song especially in certain genres. What I often do after this analysis is done is save the structure and analysis tracks along with the BPM information to my user library as a ‘drum and bass template structure’. this can then be used at a later date to give me an idea for how to form a drum and bass song in terms of its structure and speeds up the process. Even if I don’t want to follow entire the structure it can give me a way to start and can provide inspiration in the beginning stages.
I highly recommend you spend some time doing this type of analysis in addition to a ‘musical element’ type analysis to really hone your ears this would be greatly beneficial to your understanding of structure and form.
Here are some already done ready for download: